Bill Hewlett and I were raised during that depression. We had observed its devastating effects on people, including many families and friends who were close to us. My father had been appointed as a bankruptcy referee for the state of Colorado. When I returned to Pueblo during the summers of the 1930s, I often helped my father in looking up the

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Then along came Curt Herzstark, a young man who in the 1920s regularly traveled through the former Austrian Empire selling mechanical calculators to banks and other businesses. It was on these travels that he heard the same complaints from his customers.

1/? the (abridged) story of Curt Herzstark, the brilliant Viennese engineer who invented an incredibly complex handheld mechanical calculator in the Buchenwald concentration camp